McKay Coppins sat across from Mitt Romney in the senator’s Capitol Hill office looking for a higher level of alarm.

It was the night of Dec. 14, 2021, a little less than a year after the insurrection and not quite a year before the next set of midterms, and Coppins wanted to know if Romney was seeing the same warning signs that he was — a slew of Republicans on ballots across the country who had supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Romney, in Coppins’ recollection, seemed to downplay the threat.

“I’m sure there are some people who might succumb to corruption,” Romney said, “but the great majority of states and elected officials and even legislators are not going to do so.”

“Well,” Coppins said, invoking the Trump-incited riots, “after January 6, you told me you were very concerned about the fragility of democracy. Are you still concerned about it?”

Romney acknowledged he was — because of Trump, because of Trump’s “Big Lie” — “but I don’t know how widespread that is,” he said. “I’m not at the point of moral panic,” he added. “I do think that people fundamentally don’t want to be dishonest and acknowledge to themselves that they’re a dishonest person, that they’ve lied, and that they’ve thwarted democracy.”

This moment does not appear in Coppins’ biography of Romney, which is just out today. I know about it because of a handful of recent conversations I had with Coppins about the highly unusual, often clandestine conversation the two men had in more than 45 interviews over the course of more than two years. Romney: A Reckoning is filled with fun fodder for publication-day hype: unvarnished and unflattering assessments by Romney of many of the most prominent Republicans alive. But the book’s most meaningful contribution to what remains of civic discourse is the uncommonly intimate glimpse it offers of a man in elected office engaged in a hard grappling with the reality and consequences of Trump’s rise, the country’s (and in particular his party’s) increasingly antidemocratic, even authoritarian bent, and ultimately the complicated question of his own complicity.

Getting an answer to that last question required Coppins on numerous occasions to press Romney in ways he did not always like, to connect dots Romney did not always see as connected — to ultimately force him to recognize the rationalizations he had made in his career, the junctures at which he might have sacrificed his principles amidst his quest for power.

That night in Romney’s office was one of those moments.

Behind Coppins on the wall was a Rand McNally “histomap,” charting the rise and fall of the world’s leading civilizations through some 4,000 years of history, the key to the falls frequently meant the emergence of tyrants. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” Romney told Coppins the first time he showed him the map. America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature,” he said. “Authoritarianism,” he explained, “is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.” Was Romney, literally looking at a graphic depiction of a reason for democracies’ destruction, soft-pedaling the present danger?

Mitt Romney during his career had been known for control more than candor.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

“I see what you’re saying,” Coppins told him. “Nobody wants to think of themselves as a thief or a liar or whatever, but the conditions of the partisan media landscape are such that you don’t have to believe that you’re a liar. You can decide to believe in these various conspiracy theories or say, ‘Well, I’m only doing this because the other side does it,’ or, ‘What I’m doing is only correcting the corruption of the other side.’”

Romney, Coppins recalled, sat back in his chair, sort of slumped — “almost like a psychic sigh.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” Romney told Coppins. “I am concerned.”

It started in church.

Coppins on June 13, 2021, was sitting in adult Sunday school in the gym of his Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints in Oakton, Va., when he received an unexpected text message from Romney. Coppins had launched the work for the book, and Romney was a willing participant in the project. “Thought this might set the stage for our chat,” the text message from Romney said.

In Coppins’ email inbox was an attachment to Romney’s private journal running from right after his loss in the 2012 presidential campaign through the tumultuous election of 2016 — the first, it turned out, of tranches of personal documents Romney offered up. Coppins couldn’t help but start reading. “… probably should note my own feelings now that I am in the air and have a few minutes to write. Disappointed is the best word. Not angry, not despondent, maybe a little numb …” They had had a general conversation about papers or notes he might like to show or share, but Romney during his career had been known for control more than candor, and Coppins at that early stage of the work hadn’t yet thought to even specifically ask for this. “My immediate reaction was, ‘Oh, he’s entering into this in good faith,’” Coppins told me. “It showed me he was taking this seriously.”

There are different ways to take in this book. It’s an astonishing, nearly unprecedented catalog of intraparty critique. Steadily more depressing the deeper one reads, it’s a reminder of the grave current state of the republic. But it’s also, and maybe all the more importantly, a deft study of the capacity for rationalization — in this case an accounting of the chronology of Romney’s rationalizations in the business world at Bain Capital as (depending on somebody’s perspective) either a “blue-chip corporate turnaround artist” or “ruthless plutocrat who profited from destroying livelihoods,” as a political candidate starting in Massachusetts, as a presidential candidate starting in 2008, as a smart, sober, logical, capable, coherent, hyper-prepared person attempting to navigate this American era dominated by a figure he considered from the start if not outright odious then obviously absurd.

“Romney discovered,” Coppins writes, “a remarkable ability to justify his choices to himself.”

“I have learned through my life experience,” Romney told Coppins, “that it’s human to rationalize what’s in our best interest.”

In business? People had to be fired because he and Bain had a fiduciary responsibility to their investors. These companies, after all, already weren’t doing well. And in politics? Making nice with people he didn’t really like? Saying stuff he didn’t totally believe? “You say things that make the audience respond positively,” he told Coppins. “I admit it.”

In 2012, for instance, Romney agreed to accept the endorsement of Trump — at Trump’s insistence at Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas — because he calculated it would help him beat Barack Obama. And to do that, he needed not just Romney Republicans, of course, but also Donald Trump fans. Some of his advisers — even Nancy Reagan — told him to steer clear. “Romney was quick to rationalize keeping Trump inside the tent,” Coppins writes. “Alienating a guy with a massive bullhorn and a habit of holding grudges seemed risky. And while, yes, Trump was clearly ridiculous and vapid and filled with outlandish ideas, Obama had accepted endorsements and checks from every dolt and crackpot in Hollywood, from Kanye West to Lena Dunham to Adam Levine — why couldn’t Romney have his own silly celebrity surrogate? But the truth, which surprised even Romney himself, was that he liked Trump. Or at least, he liked having him around. Trump was funny and outrageous and talking to him broke up the monotony of the campaign trail.”

In the end, Mitt Romney (right) met with Donald Trump (left) after he was elected, first at Trump’s Bedminster club in New Jersey in 2016.